Inconvenient Truth versus Inconvenient Swindle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is an image footnote to my last post from a Photoshopper, Paul Atroshenko from Sydney, Australia: Big Al. (Hat tip to Camille Paglia on her column of July 11, 2007 about this month's letters).

[william.scherk]

On 3/23/2007 at 9:08 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

All in all, it was an excellent presentation. Even if one does not agree with Gore's conclusions, I see no harm at all in getting an outline of the issues and basic facts in such a clear and rational manner as he produced. There is a reason this film won an Oscar and there are so many top-notch scientists on board. It was not simply a left-wing conspiracy.

Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water ... from last month:

Quote

Al Gore announces Sundance debut for follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth

Former vice-president and climate change activist announces spiritual successor to his Oscar-winning documentary, set to debut at film festival’s new section

A follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar-winning documentary about climate change, will be among the opening night films at the forthcoming Sundance film festival.

Like its predecessor, the film will follow Al Gore as the former vice-president continues to make his case around the world that the world most wake up to the imminent threat of climate change.

“Now more than ever we must rededicate ourselves to solving the climate crisis. But we have reason to be hopeful; the solutions to the crisis are at hand,” Gore said in a statement released on Friday.

Rumors of a follow-up film have circulated since 2014, but on Friday it was confirmed that the film will be part of the festival’s The New Climate section, which features films that all have the climate or the environment at their core. The spiritual sequel comes 10 years after the original film debuted at Sundance and went on to win two Oscars, including best 

 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I wonder if Gore's new movie is going to be based on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey template again...

Since Gore is substance-challenged, at least he can tell a good story and focus on spectacle elements--like show some hurricanes, gigantic icebergs crumbling, forest fires, and for analysis, packed lecture halls, hockey-stick graphics, etc.

But the heart? What about the heart? Well, Gore can do a close-up or two again of a lonely polar bear floating along on a piece of ice in the vast emptiness with the wind blowing its fur... That always gets 'em...

I bet there's even some great b-roll left over from the first film that can be doctored up.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I wonder if Gore's new movie is going to be based on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey template again...

Since Gore is substance-challenged, at least he can tell a good story and focus on spectacle elements--like show some hurricanes, gigantic icebergs crumbling, forest fires, and for analysis, packed lecture halls, hockey-stick graphics, etc.

But the heart? What about the heart? Well, Gore can do a close-up or two again of a lonely polar bear floating along on a piece of ice in the vast emptiness with the wind blowing its fur... That always gets 'em...

I bet there's even some great b-roll left over from the first film that can be doctored up.

Michael

Glaciers  are slow motion rivers.  Underneath a mile thick layers of ice the pressure is so great that there is water literally greasing the ways for the glaciers. They flow from high ground to low ground and when they reach the edge of land they break off and "calve".  Long before humans glaciers broke off and fell into the seas.  

It is astonishing that people put any credence in  Gore's error-filled  book and movie. ------ No. I take that back.  Given the shape that science education is in, in the U.S.  I should not be at all surprised. 

[william.scherk]

Over at the mild-mannered And Then There's Physic's blog, the host (pseudonymous in all interactions on his blog and in social media, but) gave over to a guest for an Al Gore-tinged topic.

My first read through was marred by a gag reflex. During the height of 'culture wars' was when I found myself straddling the right-left divide, coming out surprisingly strongly on the side of folks who rejected 'critical theory' and 'feminist science' and so on.  The gag reflex was on the first reading of "hegemonic."  The lead author Nerlich is what some might call a negative ninny or a debbie downer, as her work tends to point out failures and unforeseen consequences of the activism embedded in some popularizations of global climate change topics.  

TheresPhysics has the most amazing equanimity, so the best parts of the guest post are in the comments.  

To the side of those remarks, I never saw the Gore movie (nor "the Swindle").  I explained why back a page or two (link).  

 

If you read past "hegemonic" and "social representation theory" and  "Dewey" without mouth-puke, closing the browser and hitting the nearest bar, I think what Nerlich et al have written is half applied common sense (dressed up in the dreary academese of her profession).  The more activist wing of global warming "worried"/concerned** doesn't take lessons well. Here ATTP does a service for both 'sides.'

I love his dry "it can be a somewhat contentious topic" ...

Quote

Guest post: ‘An inconvenient truth’ – Exploring the dynamics of making climate change public

Posted on January 15, 2017 by ...and Then There's Physics

This is a guest post by Brigitte Nerlich and Warren Pearce about their new paper called ‘An inconvenient truth’: A social representation of scientific expertise. I’ve never really had a discussion about Al Gore and “An inconvenient truth” on this blog, but I am aware that it can be a somewhat contentious topic. The reason I invited Warren and Brigitte to write this post was because I found their paper interesting, so can I ask that any who do comment try to comment in a manner that is constructive.

‘An inconvenient truth’ – Exploring the dynamics of making climate change public

In 2006, Al Gore’s climate change documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (AIT) was released, garnering substantial public attention. In a forthcoming chapter of a book on Science and the Politics of Openness (part of the Leverhulme Trust funded Making Science Public programme), we discuss the film as an example of taking climate change expertise out of the pages of science journals and into the public sphere.

While the purpose of the documentary was to persuade its audience of the consensual truth imparted by climate science experts, its effect was to become a lightning rod for dissent, critique and debate of that expertise. It became a touchstone for consent and dissent, action and reaction.

In our chapter we use some aspects of social representations theory to show how the film fostered the emergence of a (sought-after) dominant or ‘hegemonic’ social representation of climate change, while also triggering a (not so sought-after) ‘polemical’ social representation. We also observe how the film created both a public and a counter-public.

We use aspects of political theory to discuss our findings, mainly taken from the work of John Dewey, as discussed by the political theorist Mark Brown. In around 1900 Dewey started to think about the effects that increasing professionalization and specialisation of expertise could have on what he called the popularisation of knowledge. His thoughts still resonate today. Dewey was worried that these trends would make knowledge less accessible to the public, but more importantly he feared that if expert knowledge was no longer integrated in society, this would spell dangers for democracy.

From this perspective one can see AIT as a success, both as a cultural event and as a means of bringing public meaning to climate change and momentum to climate change mitigation. AIT’s combination of scientific ideas with personal stories and political activism echoes Dewey’s call for ‘bare ideas’ to have ‘imaginative content and emotional appeal’ in order to be effective (Dewey, 1989: 115). AIT also takes seriously Dewey’s notion that scientific expertise is a social product rather than the result of individual scientific brilliance and that science communication marks the return of knowledge to its rightful owners: the public. Indeed, AIT takes this one step further by seeking to empower its audience to gain the expertise to go out and disseminate locally.

Yet while Dewey points to the seeds of AIT’s success, he also shows how the successful communication of scientific knowledge and its social consequences brings more public scrutiny to bear on expertise. AIT does not only fill information deficits or knowledge deficits. Individuals are not merely passive recipients of (dominant or hegemonic) representations; they actively contribute to the construction of new representations in response. Some of these individuals assumed a critical view of AIT and Gore and began to construct a polemical counter-representation that challenged the film’s scientific credentials and its main message. This happened especially on blogs critical of mainstream climate science. A struggle ensued not only over AIT’s scientific accuracy (‘bare ideas’) but also about the films dominant personality, Al Gore as public expert and the financial and political context of his ‘enterprise’ (the social and emotional context). Bare ideas never occur in a vacuum and cannot be transmitted in a vacuum. 

[...]

Yargh.

After that some nice cleansing images of Weather Porn. The Arctic is still churning with warmth and the polar jet stream is still wobbling rather south, as it does during a negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

** -- the Yale Climate Communications project continues its work to figure out who believes what and why on the issue. I take the worried/concerned from their "Six Americas" concept.  I like removing the tag words from my own output 'alarmists' .... 'deniers'  and so on. I don't think that the categories sifted out from their surveys are necessarily cut at the joint, and it doesn't seem quite right to think of 'skeptics' as 'dismissers,' but readers might be interested in their scheme:

Quote

Global Warming’s Six Americas

---

 

One of the first rules of effective communication is to “know thy audience.” Climate change public engagement efforts must start with the fundamental recognition that people are different and have different psychological, cultural, and political reasons for acting – or not acting – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our research has identified “Global Warming’s Six Americas”: six unique audiences within the American public that each responds to the issue in their own distinct way.

Artwork by Michael Sloan

The Alarmed are fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and are already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it. The Concerned are also convinced that global warming is happening and a serious problem, but have not yet engaged the issue personally.

Three other Americas – the Cautious, the Disengaged, and the Doubtful – represent different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem, and none are actively involved. The final America – the Dismissive are very sure it is not happening and are actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The six audiences were first identified using a large nationally representative survey of American adults conducted in the fall of 2008. The survey questionnaire included extensive, in-depth measures of the public’s climate change beliefs, attitudes, risk perceptions, motivations, values, policy preferences, behaviors, and underlying barriers to action. The Six Americas are distinguishable on all these dimensions, and display very different levels of engagement with the issue.

Since 2008, we have conducted many additional studies on these six audiences, including:

• Global Warming’s Six Americas, 2009 (the original study)

• Faith, Morality and the Environment: Portraits of Global Warming’s Six Americas

• Perception of the Health Consequences of Global Warming

• Climate Stability As Understood by Global Warming’s Six Americas

• Americans’ Actions to Limit Global Warming

• Knowledge of Climate Change Across Global Warming’s Six Americas

• Message Strategies for Global Warming’s Six Americas

• Screening tools: Survey instruments; instructions for coding and data treatment; and statistical program scripts

• Identifying like-minded audiences for climate change public engagement campaigns: An audience segmentation analysis and tool development

• Global Warming’s Six Americas and the Election, 2016  

The Six Americas framework is being used by climate educators and communicators throughout the United States, including local, state, and national governments, academic institutions, environmental organizations, businesses, faith groups, doctors and scientists, and the media.

For a quick introduction, please see our short video.

[Added]  More Weather Porn, this one showing a 'spiral graph' of the Arctic sea ice extent by a 'concerned' person. As is not surprising to meteorologists, a 'hotter' Arctic means less sea ice.  

 

Final version of the Global Sea Ice Area spiral plot #climatechange #globalwarming pic.twitter.com/TfJYuvEwrZ

— Kevin Pluck (@kevpluck) January 5, 2017

Edited January 17, 2017 by william.scherk
Add the damn link ... and an icy animation

[BaalChatzaf]

Quote

 

I am a Lukewarmist.  I reside somewhere in the cautious to doubtful domain.  I do not believe the Earth is going to turn into Venus  any time in the next billion  years or so.  However raising the CO2 level too far could create some very unpleasant conditions for humans.  I think we could push the CO2 level to 500 ppm without  creating floods or deserts but I would rather not.   And we should stop deforrestration  and  work on planting lots of trees. Trees and plants are the best controller for CO2 level. I am also very much in favor of going gangbusters and build lots of fission generators  backed up by breeder reactors  for reducing the amount of  unusable fissile material  (aka waste).   Disposing of the fissile material that cannot be used for "seeding" in breeder reactors is not difficult.  Dump it on the Marianna Trench in the Pacific which is almost seven miles deep.  Out of sight out of mind.  

If we ever are smart enough to figure out how to break water down to H2 and O2 by photoactive catalytic means would put us in fat city forever.  Using sunshine to make all the H2 we could possibly use.  And we would make use of Mother Nature's  Very Own   Fusion Reactor,  our warming Sun.  If we ever get to that technology we can  let the existing fission reactors run until they have to be decommissioned  (30-50 years)  and  use nothing but solar powered catalytic hydrolizers.   It would be a new era for mankind,  as important as when we used the heat from burned hydrocarbons to generate steam.  It would be the Perfection of the industrial revolution.

[Brant Gaede]

2 hours ago, william.scherk said:

Over at the mild-mannered And Then There's Physic's blog, the host (pseudonymous in all interactions on his blog and in social media, but) gave over to a guest for an Al Gore-tinged topic.

My first read through was marred by a gag reflex. During the height of 'culture wars' was when I found myself straddling the right-left divide, coming out surprisingly strongly on the side of folks who rejected 'critical theory' and 'feminist science' and so on.  The gag reflex was on the first reading of "hegemonic."  The lead author Nerlich is what some might call a negative ninny or a debbie downer, as her work tends to point out failures and unforeseen consequences of the activism embedded in some popularizations of global climate change topics.  

TheresPhysics has the most amazing equanimity, so the best parts of the guest post are in the comments.  

To the side of those remarks, I never saw the Gore movie (nor "the Swindle").  I explained why back a page or two (link).  

 

If you read past "hegemonic" and "social representation theory" and  "Dewey" without mouth-puke, closing the browser and hitting the nearest bar, I think what Nerlich et al have written is half applied common sense (dressed up in the dreary academese of her profession).  The more activist wing of global warming "worried"/concerned** doesn't take lessons well. Here ATTP does a service for both 'sides.'

I love his dry "it can be a somewhat contentious topic" ...

Yargh.

After that some nice cleansing images of Weather Porn. The Arctic is still churning with warmth and the polar jet stream is still wobbling rather south, as it does during a negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation.

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

** -- the Yale Climate Communications project continues its work to figure out who believes what and why on the issue. I take the worried/concerned from their "Six Americas" concept.  I like removing the tag words from my own output 'alarmists' .... 'deniers'  and so on. I don't think that the categories sifted out from their surveys are necessarily cut at the joint, and it doesn't seem quite right to think of 'skeptics' as 'dismissers,' but readers might be interested in their scheme:

[Added]  More Weather Porn, this one showing a 'spiral graph' of the Arctic sea ice extent by a 'concerned' person. As is not surprising to meteorologists, a 'hotter' Arctic means less sea ice.  

 

WTF?

[Brant Gaede]

2 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

I am a Lukewarmist.  I reside somewhere in the cautious to doubtful domain.  I do not believe the Earth is going to turn into Venus  any time in the next billion  years or so.  However raising the CO2 level too far could create some very unpleasant conditions for humans.  I think we could push the CO2 level to 500 ppm without  creating floods or deserts but I would rather not.   And we should stop deforrestration  and  work on planting lots of trees. Trees and plants are the best controller for CO2 level. I am also very much in favor of going gangbusters and build lots of fission generators  backed up by breeder reactors  for reducing the amount of  unusable fissile material  (aka waste).   Disposing of the fissile material that cannot be used for "seeding" in breeder reactors is not difficult.  Dump it on the Marianna Trench in the Pacific which is almost seven miles deep.  Out of sight out of mind.  

If we ever are smart enough to figure out how to break water down to H2 and O2 by photoactive catalytic means would put us in fat city forever.  Using sunshine to make all the H2 we could possibly use.  And we would make use of Mother Nature's  Very Own   Fusion Reactor,  our warming Sun.  If we ever get to that technology we can  let the existing fission reactors run until they have to be decommissioned  (30-50 years)  and  use nothing but solar powered catalytic hydrolizers.   It would be a new era for mankind,  as important as when we used the heat from burned hydrocarbons to generate steam.  It would be the Perfection of the industrial revolution.

There are more trees than ever. And the more CO2 the more trees and other plant life. What are the "unpleasant conditions"? Why would significantly higher CO2 levels create floods and deserts? Why are you using 500ppm? Isn't it now 300? (I don't know.) Specifically what is a "Lukewarmist"?

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Brant Gaede said:

There are more trees than ever. And the more CO2 the more trees and other plant life. What are the "unpleasant conditions"? Why would significantly higher CO2 levels create floods and deserts? Why are you using 500ppm? Isn't it now 300? (I don't know.) Specifically what is a "Lukewarmist"?

--Brant

The lukewarmist position accepts the fact (proved by Tyndall)  that CO2 slows down the radiation of energy  to space in the IR range.  It is like a blanket, which traps some of the heat (actually is reflects back some of the IR to the surface -- about 1/2 and radiates the other 1/2 to space).  If the sun stopped shining the CO2 in the atmosphere would not prevent the Earth from freezing but it would delay it some.  On the night side of the earth CO2 slows up the radiation of the energy in the IR range.   The more CO2, the more the radiation is slowed.  In the extreme case  of Venus which has an atmosphere that is 96 percent CO2 (960,000 ppm)   the surface temperature is about 900 deg F.  Hot enough to melt lead. This is true on the dark side of Venus as well.  

We have CO2 at about 400 ppm  (compare that to 960,000 ppm).  The amount of warming is about 15 C  above the black body temperature of the Earth which is below the freezing point of water.  W.O. CO2, CH4 and other green house gasses  the Earth would be frozen at the surface and life could only exist deep under sea near geothermal vents.  So some CO2 is necessary to keep the temperature above freezing point of water to to supply plants with material to photosynthesize.  Plants  take in CO2 to build their tissue and make metabolants and they expire O2  which us animals need to live.  It is a great deal.  We inhale O2 and exhale CO2.  The plants absorb CO2 and expire O2. 

As a lukewarmist I do not share the panic which the  AGW extremists seem to manifest.   We are living in a nice cozy interglacial period and we should manage things so that the mild weather lasts for a long time.  It is a fact that human civilizations flourish when it is warm and they diminish during a cold period.  That is because cold weather makes food scarce and no agricultural surpluses can be produced during a cold snap or an ice age. During an ice age humans live on the bleeding edge.  If the earth froze from pole to pole (which probably happened about 500,000,000 ybp)   humans could very well go extinct. As it was during the last ice max (when the glaciers were advancing,  about 15,000  ybp)  humans could only flourish in the tropics.  So a mild interglacial is good for human progress and I would like to extend that as long as possible to delay the next hard ice age. 

I also like clean air.  I would like to see coal burning phased out over the next 25 years.  Coal produces some nasty byproducts;  SO2, Nox and particulates of the order of 2.5 microns or less in diameter.  These particulates raise holy hell with lung tissue.  It is worse for people than smoking cigarettes. Natural Gas produces 1/8 of the CO2  per Joule of heat energy produced compared to coal.  So if we have to burn stuff,  better natural gas than coal. Coal is a legacy of phase 1.0 of the industrial revolution.  It is sooooo 19 th century.  We are much better off using nuclear fission.  

[Brant Gaede]

There is no evident/evidence bridge for a Lukewarmist and AGW?

China needs to clean up 10 times more than we do--ASAP.

If you don't want lung cancer try drinking several cups of greeen tea/day. (Not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.)

--Brant

[BaalChatzaf]

20 minutes ago, Brant Gaede said:

There is no evident/evidence bridge for a Lukewarmist and AGW?

China needs to clean up 10 times more than we do--ASAP.

If you don't want lung cancer try drinking several cups of greeen tea/day. (Not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.)

--Brant

The AGW panic squad thinks the Earth will turn into Venus next century.  I do not.  The Climate Models  do a very bad job of separating natural climate change drivers from changes brought about by human activity.   I don't see how t he average temperature and increase 8 degrees C by the end of the century.  But even if it did,  Earth would still not become Venus.  The Earth has been much hotter in the past, and life flourished anyway. 

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

The AGW panic squad thinks the Earth will turn into Venus next century.  I do not.  The Climate Models  do a very bad job of separating natural climate change drivers from changes brought about by human activity.   I don't see how t he average temperature and increase 8 degrees C by the end of the century.  But even if it did,  Earth would still not become Venus.  The Earth has been much hotter in the past, and life flourished anyway. 

The Eocene.

55 - 33 mya.

Redwoods grew north of the Arctic Circle.

--Brant

thx to Jack Wheeler

[BaalChatzaf]

12 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

There is no evident/evidence bridge for a Lukewarmist and AGW?

China needs to clean up 10 times more than we do--ASAP.

If you don't want lung cancer try drinking several cups of greeen tea/day. (Not published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.)

--Brant

The issue of air pollution is distinct from the issue of AGW.  There are some common factors among which  is coal burning.   Coal burning and steam engines where the "high-tech"  of the Victorian era.  We will always need steam engines to turn over the turbine-generators to make electric current,  but it is time to move on past coal.  To make coal ecologically feasible one needs very expensive cleaning to get the SO2, NOx  and ppm2.5  out of the effluent.  CO2 is inevitable no matter how clean we burn coal.   Burning natural gas produce 1/6 as much CO2 per kiloJoule of energy produced by the burning and there is no ppm2.5 particulate matter produces by burning CH4 (natural gas).  In the long run we have to phase out burning CH4 and go to other methods of superheating water. 

[william.scherk]

19 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

There is no evident/evidence bridge for a Lukewarmist and AGW?

It's where the best discussions happen, on that bridge, for me at least, Brant. Which makes it a great question. 

Where a lukewarmist and a 'concerned' get closest is on what Judith Curry calls the Uncertainty Monster.  It opens all the disputes, even if not in easy-to-remember soundbites: arctic amplification, 'lack of fit' or skill in  models X, Y and Z, lapsed predictions, the finicky bits about feedbacks, clouds, solar irradiance, and of course other margins. 

It is sort of like the "we don't know" or "we don't know yet" is where the interesting action is for me. 

Let me give an example from today's headlines out of the news rubric "climate." Today there were simultaneous releases of the Big Three yearly charts of 2016 global temperatures. 

Earth Will Turn Into Venus By 2200**

18 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

19 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

The AGW panic squad thinks the Earth will turn into Venus next century.

The Eocene.

Human beings sure love telling and listening to stories. The history of Earth is nowadays better understood than at any time in the past. Some sciences have advanced at astonishing speeds (eg, computer evolution). That you know something about the Eocene and Bob knows things about Venusian atmosphere and the Tyndall Gas effect ... it doesn't always mean we can interpret 'news' from the climate desk to mutual satisfaction. 

Example via NASA. 

 

** NASA, NASA, NASA. EarthVenus by 2200.

More seriously, the 'hottest' year hoopla is not meaningful except as a notch on a gauge. Next year can fall back below the 'hottest' line. I heard it best said as, "Baby, it's the trend."  The NASA/NOAA joint release came at the same time as the HadCRUT made their 2016 numbers public.  The biggest baddest and most surprising rise is in the Arctic, year over year ... the temperature of the Arctic was one full degree C over all previous years on record, which is for some people, unmistakeable evidence that one line of climate theory is correct: Arctic amplification.

Weird things in the Arctic. Some folks are 'concerned' that the year-over-year jump of  one degree not jump back down but jump up again.

If 'hottest' is not meaningful except as a notch mark, best wait thirty years to more accurately measure the 'signal' from CO2 concentrations?  Since that is a meaningful time in which to detect a trend and all.

[added: a bit of Tracinski at the Federalist, spanking the New York Times for giving no numbers in reporting the NASA/NOAA/HadCRUT 'numbers.'  I'll have to read this three more times.]

Quote

• GLOBAL WARMING

Why NYT Hid The Numbers For The ‘Hottest Year On Record’

When you read a science report claiming that 2016 was the hottest year on record, you might expect that you will get numbers. And you would be wrong.

 

By Robert Tracinski

JANUARY 18, 2017

 

They say that mathematics is the language of science, which is a way of saying that science is quantitative. It is moved forward by numbers and measurements, not just by qualitative observations. “It seems hot out” is not science. Giving a specific temperature, measured by a specific process at a specific time, compared to other systematically gathered measurements—that is science.

So when you read an article proclaiming that, for the third year in a row, last year was the hottest year on record, you might expect that right up front you will get numbers, measurements, and a statistical margin of error. You know, science stuff. Numbers. Quantities. Mathematics.

 

And you would be wrong.

I just got done combing through a New York Times report titled, “Earth Sets a Temperature Record for the Third Straight Year.” The number of relevant numbers in this article is: zero.

We are not told what the average global temperature was, how much higher this is than last year’s record or any previous records, or what the margin of error is supposed to be on those measurements. Instead, we get stuff like this.

Marking another milestone for a changing planet, scientists reported on Wednesday that the Earth reached its highest temperature on record in 2016—trouncing a record set only a year earlier, which beat one set in 2014. It is the first time in the modern era of global warming data that temperatures have blown past the previous record three years in a row.

Note to the New York Times: “trouncing” and “blown past” are phrases appropriate to sports reporting, not science reporting. Except that no sports reporter would dare write an article in which he never bothers to give you the score of the big game.

 

Yet that’s what passes for “science reporting” on the issue of global warming, where asking for numbers and margins of errors apparently makes you an enemy of science. Instead, it’s all qualitative and comparative descriptions. It’s science without numbers.

Edited January 19, 2017 by william.scherk
Added heat. Later added Tracinski.